


Identity

by thundersnowstorm



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Drabble, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-17
Updated: 2015-01-17
Packaged: 2018-03-07 23:37:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3187508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thundersnowstorm/pseuds/thundersnowstorm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She wears Natalia to survive, but she wears Natasha to live.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Identity

Natalia

Nastasya

Nadia

Nancy

Naomi

Natalie

Natasha

The names she has called herself rattle around her mind, bumping into each other and mixing like spilled cans of paint. Each make up a part of her, but not all names were created equal. Most of them have faded in disuse, covers ready to be slipped on in a moment’s notice, but nothing more than outfits she wouldn’t cry over losing. 

Natalia and Natasha are covers that have stuck to her skin far too long for comfort.

She is a spy. She is supposed to be a chameleon, changing colors so often not even she knows her original color, but no matter how far she may have distanced herself from humanity, she is still human at the core. 

Natalia Romanova is who she was told she was, because any parents she may have had at one point are nothing but caricatures in her mind. Maybe Natalia was a name made up by the Red Room, maybe it was just her first cover, but her subconscious decided it was what she was long ago.

Natalia is red lipstick on a mark’s cooling skin. She is five ceramic blades hidden in the folds of a silk cocktail dress. She is the Black Widow, assassin and honeypot all in one, as remorseless as she is beautiful. She is bitter black coffee, tossed back for its buzz, not its taste. She is whoever it is most convenient to be.

Natalia is the one they whisper about with trepidation in dark alleys in the bowels of maggot-filled cities. Natalia is the one to slit a man’s throat and make it look like an accident. Natalia is heartless.

She was Natalia for a long time. Then the man with the bow saved her life and the man with one eye gave her the choice. She joined them because a dead assassin is a useless one, and maybe because part of her didn’t want to be Natalia forever.

That part of her is different from all of her previous identities. Natasha Romanoff. She started out as nothing more than a new cover to keep the man with the bow happy and the man with one eye from distrusting her, but somewhere along the line, Natasha became something different.

Natasha is soft where Natalia is hard. She is altruistic where Natalia would be pragmatic. She is normal, average, ordinary, in all the ways Natalia never could be, indistinguishable from the thousands of twenty-somethings milling around every major city of the world, still unsure of what they want to do and who they want to be.

Natasha is a ketchup-stained hoodie and yoga pants on lazy Sunday afternoons. She is six of those outrageously expensive and sugary Starbucks drinks in under an hour because Clint dared her. She is the spiraling stacks of books in her safe house apartment, full of material ranging from Cold War history to third wave feminist theory to trashy romances.

Natasha is the ballet classes Natalia had wished so violently to be. Natasha adopts a cat from the pound because the silence of her apartment was too loud. Natasha is human.

Natalia and Natasha are a constantly adjusting balance, always on the tip of collapsing. Yin and yang, left brain and right brain, two halves of a whole contradiction. She is Natasha and Natalia, not one or the other.

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on tumblr at thundersnowstorm for lots of Marvel blogging and meta


End file.
